Shakespeare's Lost Years in London by Arthur Acheson (audio ebook reader .txt) 📕

Hunsdon had most profitably entertained learning in themselves to the vital warmth of freezing Science," etc. Peele's allusions to the movement in his dedication to the _Honour of the Garter_, which is dated 26th June 1593, are as follows:

"Renowned Lord, Northumberland's fair flower,
The Muses' love, patron and favourite,
That artisans and scholars dost embrace.
And clothest Mathesis in rich ornaments,
That admirable mathematic skill,
Familiar with the stars and Zodiac,
To whom the heaven lies open as her book;
By whose directions undeceivable,
Leaving our Schoolmen's vulgar trodden paths,
And following the ancient reverent steps
Of Trismegistus and Pythagoras,
Through uncouth ways and unaccessible,
Doth pass into the pleasant spacious fields
Of divine science and philosophy," etc.

Shakespeare evidently reflects knowledge of this academical attempt and pokes fun at the scholars in his reference to "a little academie" in _Love's Labour's Lost_:

"Navarre shall be the wonder of the world
Our Court shall be a little academie
Still and contemplative in living art."

This play was originally written late in 1591, but was drastically revised late in 1594, or early in 1595, after Shakespeare had read Chapman's _Hymns to the Shadow of Night_; and again, in 1598. The reference to the Academy was evidently introduced at the time of its first revision.

Mr. Simpson recognises the fact that most of the Chrisoganus passages, especially those in the earlier portions of _Histriomastix_, pertain to the play in its original form. If the reader will take the trouble to read Chapman's _Hymns to the Shadow of Night_ (1594), his poem to Thomas Harriot, and his _Tears of Peace_, and compare their mental attitude and verbal characteristics with the "Chrisoganus" and "Peace" passages of _Histriomastix_, Chapman's authorship of the latter will become apparent. The following parallels from four of Chapman's poems are convincing, and they can be extended indefinitely:

_Histriomastix_--

"Have always borne themselves in Godlike State
With lofty foreheade higher than the stars."

_De Guiana, Carmen Epicum_--

"Whose forehead knocks against the roof of stars."

_Histriomastix_--

"Consume whole groves and standing fields of corn
In thy wild rage and make the proud earth groan."

_The Shadow of Night_--

"Convert the violent courses of thy floods,
Remove whole fields of corn and highest woods."

_Histriomastix_--

"Whose glory which thy solid virtues won
Shall honour Europe while there shines a sun."

_Poem to Harriot_--

"When thy true wisdom by thy learning won
Shall honour learning while there shines a sun."

Chapman in several instances in this play echoes Greene's slurs against Shakespeare and, in the same manner as Peele in the _Honour of the Garter_, repeats the actual phrases and epithets used by Greene and Nashe.

_Histriomastix_--

"I scorn a scoffing fool about my throne—
An artless idiot (that like AEsop's daw
Plumes fairer feathered birds)."

These lines evince Chapman's knowledge of Nashe's phrase "idiot art-master," and of Greene's "upstart crow beautified with our feathers," and clearly pertain to the play in its earlier form (1593) when Greene's _Groatsworth of Wit_ (published late in 1592) was still a new publication. In fact, it is not improbable that Nashe collaborated with Chapman in the early form of this play.

Again when Chapman writes the following lines:

_Histriomastix_--

"O age, when every Scriveners boy shall dippe
Profaning quills into Thessalies spring;
When every artist prentice that hath read
The pleasant pantry of conceipts shall dare
To write as confident as Hercules;
When every ballad-monger boldly writes," etc.

It is apparent that he again echoes Nashe's and Greene's attacks upon Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, all of which, however, he appears to have thought (as have later critics) were directed against Shakespeare.

The lines quoted above evidently reflect Chapman's knowledge of Nashe's preface to Greene's _Menaphon_ in the expressions "Scriveners boy," "artist prentice," and "ballad-monger," while the words

"shall dippe
Profaning quills into Thessalies spring"

refer to Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, and the lines from Ovid with which he heads that poem.

In 1593 when, as I have indicated, _Histriomastix_ in its early form was written, Shakespeare had published _Venus and Adonis_ and dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton. In the composition of this poem Shakespeare undoubtedly worked from Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_. He prefixed to the poem two lines from Ovid's fifteenth Elegy:

"Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua";

which are rendered in Marlowe's translation:

"Let base conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses springs."

In _The Shadow of Night_, published in the following year, Chapman again resents the fact that one of Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek" should invade the classical preserves of the scholars for his poetical and dramatic subjects:

"Then you that exercise the virgin court
Of peaceful Thespia, my muse consort,
Making her drunken with Gorgonean dews,
And therewith all your ecstasies infuse,
That she may reach the topless starry brows
Of steep Olympus, crown'd with freshest boughs
Of Daphnean laurel, and the praises sing
Of mighty Cynthia: truly figuring
(As she is Hecate) her sovereign kind,
And in her force, the forces of the mind:
An argument to ravish and refine
An earthly soul and make it more devine.
Sing then with all, her palace brightness bright,
The dazzle-sun perfection of her light;
Circling her face with glories, sing the walks,
Where in her heavenly magic mood she stalks,
Her arbours, thickets, and her wondrous game,
(A huntress being never match'd in fame,)
_Presume not then ye flesh-confounded souls,
That cannot bear the full Castalian bowls_,
Which sever mounting spirits from the senses,
_To look into this deep fount for thy pretenses_."

In these lines, besides indicating Shakespeare's recent Ovidian excursion in _Venus and Adonis_ by his reference to "Castalian bowls," Chapman shows knowledge of Shakespeare's intention, in the composition of _Love's Labour's Lost_, of exhibiting Queen Elizabeth as a huntress. Chapman's Cynthia of _The Shadow of Night_ is plainly a rhapsodised idealisation of the Queen. Later on I shall elaborate the fact that _Love's Labour's Lost_ was written late in 1591, or early in 1592, as a reflection of the Queen's progress to Cowdray House, the home of the Earl of Southampton's maternal grandfather, Viscount Montague, and that the shooting of deer by the Princess and her ladies fancifully records phases of the entertainments arranged for the Queen during her visit.

Assuming, then, from the foregoing evidence and inferences that Chapman composed the early _Histriomastix_ in 1593, let us examine the play further in order to trace its fuller application to Shakespeare and his affairs in that year.

Though _Histriomastix_ was revised as an attack upon Shakespeare in 1599 by Chapman and Marston, who had commenced to collaborate in dramatic work in the previous year, its original plot and action remain practically unaltered. In its revision its early anti-Shakespearean intention was merely amplified and brought up to date by a few topical allusions, fitting circumstances in the lives of the persons caricatured, pertaining to the later period. The substitution of _Troilus and Cressida_ for _The Prodigal Child_, as the play within the play presented by Sir Oliver Owlet's company, is also due to the period of revision. All of the passages of the play which are suggestive of the period of revision are palpably in the style of John Marston.

Among the persons of the early play is Chrisoganus, a scholar and mathematician, who has set up an academy to expound the seven liberal Sciences: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy, all of which are introduced as persons in the first act. Chrisoganus was undoubtedly intended for Chapman's friend Thomas Harriot, the mathematician and astronomer, who was so prominent in the academical movement of 1592-93. The name Chrisoganus is evidently a reflection of Harriot's _Ephemeris Chrisometra_, a MS. copy of which is preserved in Zion College. Chapman's poem to Harriot, prefixed to his _Achilles Shield_ (1599), expresses many of the same ideas voiced in _Histriomastix_ and in much the same language, and indicates Chapman's collaboration with Marston in the revision of the play in that year.

In the early _Histriomastix_ Chapman represents himself in the character of Peace. When the utterances of Peace are compared with certain of Chapman's poems, such as his _Euthymia Raptus_, or _The Tears of Peace_ (1609), his poem to Harriot (1598), _The Shadow of Night_ (1594), and _Ovid's Banquet of Sense_ (1595), in all of which he breaks away from his subject-matter at intervals to extol his own virtues and bewail his poverty and his neglect by patrons, it becomes evident that he transfigures himself in _Histriomastix_ as Peace; which character acts as a chorus to, or running commentary on, the action of the play.

The whole spirit and purpose of this play is reproduced in _The Tears of Peace_, which is a dialogue between Peace and an interlocutor, who discuss at great length exactly the same ideas and subjects, dramatically treated, in _Histriomastix_, _i.e._ the neglect of learning and the learned, and "the pursuit of wealth, glory, greatness, pleasure, and fashion" by "plebian and lord alike," as well as the unaccountable success of an ignorant playwright who writes plays on any subject that comes into his head:

"And how they trot out in their lines the ring